W I L E Y- B L A C K W E L L C O M PA N I O N S T O F I L M D I R E C T O R S
A Companion to
Pedro Almodóvar
Edited by
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar
Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose
work constitutes what is referred to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons.
Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergmann, Capra or the Coen Brothers,
each volume, composed of twenty-five or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts, explores a canonical, contemporary, and/or controversial
auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multidimensional capacity. Individual
volumes interrogate any number of subjects – the director’s oeuvre; dominant
themes, well-known, worthy, and underrated films; stars, collaborators, and key
influences; reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency
in the scholarly world.
Published
1. A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann
2. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague
3. A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker
4. A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager
5. A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
6. A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus
7. A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau
8. A Companion to François Truffaut, edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillian
9. A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Robert Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla
A Companion to
Pedro Almodóvar
Edited by
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition first published 2013
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to Pedro Almodóvar / edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon.
p. cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell companions to film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-9582-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Almodóvar, Pedro–Criticism and interpretation.
I. D’Lugo, Marvin. II. Vernon, Kathleen M., 1951–
PN1998.3.A46C585 2013
791.4302′33092–dc23
2012033137
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Pedro Almodóvar © AF archive / Alamy
Cover design by Nicki Averill Design and Illustration
Set in 11/13pt Dante by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
1
2013
Contents
Notes on Contributors
viii
Acknowledgments
xv
Introduction: The Skin He Lives In
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
1
Part I Bio-Filmography
19
1 Almodóvar’s Self-Fashioning: The Economics and Aesthetics
of Deconstructive Autobiography
Paul Julian Smith
21
2 Creative Beginnings in Almodóvar’s Work
Francisco A. Zurian
39
3 Almodóvar and Hitchcock: A Sorcerer’s Apprenticeship
Dona Kercher
59
4 A Life, Imagined and Otherwise: The Limits and Uses
of Autobiography in Almodóvar’s Films
Alberto Mira
Part II
Spanish Contexts
88
105
5 El Deseo’s “Itinerary”: Almodóvar and the Spanish Film Industry
Marina Díaz López
107
6 Almodóvar and Spanish Patterns of Film Reception
Josetxo Cerdán and Miguel Fernández Labayen
129
7 Memory, Politics, and the Post-Transition in Almodóvar’s Cinema
Juan Carlos Ibáñez
153
vi
Contents
8 The Ethics of Oblivion: Personal, National, and Cultural
Memories in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar
Adrián Pérez Melgosa
Part III At the Limits of Gender
9 Our Rapists, Ourselves: Women and the Staging of Rape
in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
Leora Lev
10 Paternity and Pathogens: Mourning Men and the Crises
of Masculinity in Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Hable Con Ella
Dean Allbritton
11 Domesticating Violence in the Films of Pedro Almodóvar
Noelia Saenz
176
201
203
225
244
12 La piel que habito: A Story of Imposed Gender and the Struggle
for Identity
Francisco A. Zurian
262
Part IV Re-readings
279
13 Re-envoicements and Reverberations in Almodóvar’s
Macro-Melodrama
Marsha Kinder
281
14 The Flower of His Secret: Carne trémula and the Mise en Scène
of Desire
Celestino Deleyto
304
15 Scratching the Past on the Surface of the Skin: Embodied
Intersubjectivity, Prosthetic Memory, and Witnessing
in Almodóvar’s La mala educación
Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla
322
16 Almodóvar’s Stolen Images
Javier Herrera
345
Part V Global Almodóvar
365
17 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown:
From Madrid (1988) to New York (2010)
Isolina Ballesteros
367
18 Almodóvar’s Global Musical Marketplace
Kathleen M. Vernon
387
Contents
19 Almodóvar and Latin America: The Making of a Transnational
Aesthetic in Volver
Marvin D’Lugo
vii
412
20 Is there a French Almodóvar?
Jean-Claude Seguin
432
21 Almodóvar in Asia: Hong Kong, Taiwan, and LGBT Film Culture
E. K. Tan
453
Part VI
469
Art and Commerce
22 To the Health of the Author: Art Direction in Los abrazos rotos
John D. Sanderson
23 Making Spain Fashionable: Fashion and Design in Pedro
Almodóvar’s Cinema
Gerard Dapena
471
495
24 Almodóvar, Cyberfandom, and Participatory Culture
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega
524
Index
551
Notes on Contributors
Dean Allbritton is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Colby College with a Ph.D.
in Hispanic Languages and Literature from SUNY Stony Brook. His work analyzes
metaphors of illness and masculinity in contemporary Spanish film as focal points
for larger discourses of national and societal health. His critical interests include
the fields of illness and disability studies, film theory, contemporary Spanish film,
and masculinity studies. He has published articles in Studies in Hispanic Cinemas
and Post Script.
Isolina Ballesteros is Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages
and Comparative Literature of Baruch College, CUNY. Her teaching focuses on
modern peninsular studies (nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and film),
comparative literature, and Spanish and European film. Her field of specialty is
contemporary Spanish cultural studies and her current research reflects a dual
interest in gender, ethnicity and migration to Europe, and the cultural memory of
the Spanish Civil War. She is the author of two books: Escritura femenina y discurso
autobiográfico en la nueva novela española (1994) and Cine (Ins)urgente: textos fílmicos y
contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (2001). She is currently working on a
book called: “Undesirable” Otherness and “Immigration Cinema” in the European
Union.
Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos is Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication, Journalism and Advertising Studies at the Universitat Rovira i
Virgili where he was coordinator of the M.A. degree program from 1998 to 2008.
He is Artistic Director of Punto de Vista, the Festival Internacional de Cine
Documental de Navarra. He is author of Ricardo Urgoiti. Los trabajos y los días
(2007) and editor of the books Mirada, memoria y fascinación (2001); Documental y
Vanguardia (2005); Al otro lado de la ficción (2007); and Suevia Films – Cesáreo González
(2005); Signal Fires: The Cinema of Jem Cohen (2010). His principal research areas are
non-fiction film, Spanish cinema, and television.
Notes on Contributors
ix
Gerard Dapena is a scholar of Hispanic cinemas and visual culture. He
received his Ph.D. in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation examined the interface of film and painting in post-Civil War Spanish
cinema. He has published and lectured on different aspects of Spanish and
Latin American film and art history and taught at New York University, Bard
College, Macalester College, The New School, and The School of Visual Arts,
among other institutions. Currently, he is working on a book-length study of
early Francoist cinema.
Celestino Deleyto is Professor of Film and English Studies at the University of
Zaragoza, Spain. He is the author of The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (2009) and
co-author, with María del Mar Azcona, of Alejandro González Iñárritu (2010).
Marina Díaz López holds a doctorate in film history from the Universidad
Autónoma de Madrid. She is in charge of the film and audiovisual office of the
Instituto Cervantes (Madrid). She had edited two collections of essays in Latin
American cinema in collaboration with Alberto Elena: Tierra en trance. El cine latioamericano en 100 películas (1999) and The Cinema of Latin America (2000) and is the
author of various articles on the transnational dimensions of Mexican and Spanish
cinemas. She was part of the editorial board of the Spanish film journals Secuencias
and Revista de Historia del cine and currently serves on the board of Studies in
Hispanic Cinemas.
Marvin D’Lugo is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and
Adjunct Professor of Screen Studies at Clark University where he teaches
courses on Spanish, Latin American and U.S. Latino cinemas. He is author of
The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing (1991); Guide to the Cinema of
Spain (1997); and Pedro Almodóvar (2006). He has also written extensively on
Cuban, Mexican, and Argentine cinemas. He is currently working on a book on
Pedro Almodóvar in Latin America. Since 2008 he has served as Principal Editor
of Studies in Hispanic Cinemas. He is a member of the editorial boards of Archivos
de la Filmoteca (Filmoteca Valenciana), Secuencias (Universidad Autónoma de
Madrid), and Transnational Cinemas.
Miguel Fernández Labayen is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de
Madrid. He has written several articles on experimental filmmaking and contemporary Spanish cinema, contributing to collective books such as Latsploitation,
Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America (2009) and Contemporary Spanish Cinema and
Genre (2009). He is the co-director of “Xperimenta: Contemporary Glances at
Experimental Cinema,” an event held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de
Barcelona (CCCB). His current research explores contemporary Spanish audiovisual culture.
x
Notes on Contributors
Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative
Literature at the University of Southern California. His publications on Spanish
and Latin American cinema have appeared in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Spain
on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Bulletin of Latin American
Research, Hispanic Research Journal, Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film
from Latin America, Journal of Romance Studies, Gender and Spanish Cinema, and
Studies in Hispanic Cinemas. His book, Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and
Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema, was published in 2008. He has
forthcoming publications in a Blackwell Companion to Spanish Cinema, in an edited
volume on Hispanic and Lusophone Female Filmmakers and in the Revista de Crítica
Literaria Latinoamericana. He is currently working on a book about ethics, memory, and subjectivity in contemporary Spanish cinema.
Javier Herrera is Librarian of the Filmoteca Española and Curator of Luis Buñuel’s
personal archives. He is author of Picasso, Madrid y el 98 (1997), Las Hurdes un documental de Luis Buñuel (1999), El cine en su historia (2005), El cine. Guía para su estudio
(2005), and Estudios sobre Las Hurdes de Buñuel (2006). Besides his contributions
to various special journal issues devoted to Buñuel, he has also edited critical
collections on film topics: La poesía del cine y Los poetas del cine (2003); El documental
latinoamericano (2004); and with Cristina Martinez-Carazo he co-edited Hispanismo
y cine (2007) and a special issue of Letras Peninsulares devoted to Buñuel y/o
Almodóvar. El laberinto del deseo (2010).
Juan Carlos Ibáñez is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His work centers on the analysis of the history
of cinema and television in the context of the social, cultural, and political transformations taking place in contemporary Spain. During the last few years he has
focused on the relation between the European economic crisis and national identity in Spanish audiovisual culture. His recent publications include the co-edited
volume, Memoria histórica e identidad en cine y televisión (2010) and an article on the
introduction of postmodern thought and aesthetics in Spain, “Comedia sentimental y posmodernidad en el cine español de la transición a la democracia” (2012).
Dona Kercher is Professor of Spanish and Film at Assumption College in
Worcester, MA. She has published numerous articles on Spanish Golden Age
literature and Spanish film, especially focusing on Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón and
Álex de la Iglesia. This essay is part of her forthcoming book Latin Hitchcock.
Marsha Kinder began her career as a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature before moving to the study of transmedial relations among various art forms.
She currently is Professor of Critical Studies in the University of Southern California
School of Cinematic Arts where she has been teaching since 1980, and where her
specialties include Spanish cinema, narrative theory, database documentaries, and
Notes on Contributors
xi
digital culture. She has published over 100 essays and ten books, including Blood
Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (1993), Refiguring Spain (1997),
Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1993), and Kids’ Media
Culture (2000). Her current book in progress is The Discreet Charms of Database
Narrative. She has been a member of the editorial board of Film Quarterly since
1977. In 1995 she received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship
and in 2001, was named a University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary
research. Since 1997 she has directed “The Labyrinth Project,” a research initiative
on interactive narrative, producing database documentaries and new models of
digital scholarship in collaboration with artists, scholars, scientists, and archivists.
These works have been featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and
conferences worldwide and have won prestigious awards, including the New Media
Invision Award, the British Academy Award, and the Jury Award at Sundance for
New Narrative Forms.
Leora Lev is Professor of Foreign Languages at Bridgewater State University and
Lecturer in the ISA Paris Fine Arts Program. She edited and contributed with
essays and a John Waters interview to Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of
Dennis Cooper (2006), and has published chapters, essays, and reviews in Film
Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, the South Atlantic Review, Revista de
Estudios Hispánicos, Anales de Literatura Española Contemporánea, the Catalan Review,
American Book Review, Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (1995),
Spanish Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1998), The
Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (2007), Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge (2007), and
the text for Paris-based artist Scott Treleaven’s exhibit (Kavi Gupta Gallery,
Chicago/Berlin). She was interviewed by the New York Times, the Village Voice, and
New York University Research on the topic of transgressive art.
Alberto Mira is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University (U.K.), where
he teaches courses on Spanish cinema, classical Hollywood narration and stars. He
co-devised the Film Studies undergraduate program in 2004, and also contributes
to the postgraduate M.A. in Popular Cinema. Between 1997–99, he was Queen
Sofía Research Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. He has published extensively on
Francoist cinema, gender in Spanish cinema, Iván Zulueta, and Pedro Almodóvar
for various Spanish, British, and U.S. journals and essay collections. He was editor
of 24 Frames: The Cinema of Spain and Portugal (2005). As one of the leading specialists in Spanish gay history and culture, he is the author of the dictionary Para
entendernos (1999) and the cultural history De Sodoma a Chueca (2004) as well as a
monograph on gay and lesbian cinema: Miradas Insumisas. Gays y lesbianas en el cine
(2008). Other publications include articles on Lorca, Latin American literature and
monographs on Spanish theater, as well as critical editions and Spanish translations of plays by Oscar Wilde and Edward Albee. He is the author of two novels,
Londres para corazones despistados (2004) and Como la tentación (2005).
xii
Notes on Contributors
Adrián Pérez Melgosa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic
Languages and Literature at SUNY Stony Brook. His work centers on transnational and cross-cultural representation and politics in both the Americas and
Spain. He has published articles in Social Text, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies,
Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, and Latin American Literary Review, among other journals. The volume, Revisiting Jewish Spain, which he co-edited with Tabea Linhard
and Daniela Flesler, appeared as a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural
Studies (Summer 2011). His most recent book is Cinema and Inter-American Relations:
Tracking Transnational Affect (2012).
Vicente Rodríguez Ortega is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Journalism and Communications at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He is
the co-editor of Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre (2009) and has published
essays in a variety of book collections and journals such as Transnational Cinemas,
Studies in European Cinema, Film International and Icono 14. He is the author of the
forthcoming volume La Ciudad Global en el Cine Contemporáneo: una perspectiva
transnacional. He is also a regular contributor to the online film journal Reverse Shot
and has made a feature-length documentary titled Freddy’s.
Noelia Saenz holds a Ph.D. in Critical Studies from the University of Southern
California. Her work explores issues of gender, sexuality, gendered violence and
identity in contemporary Spanish, Latin American and Latino cinema.
John D. Sanderson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies of the
Universidad de Alicante, Spain, where he teaches film and literature, and film and
theater translation. He is also a lecturer in postgraduate courses at the Universities
of Málaga, Valencia, and the Centro de Estudios Ciudad de la Luz (Alicante). He is
the author of the book Traducir el teatro de Shakespeare: figuras retóricas iterativas en
Ricardo III (2002), and the editor of several volumes including ¿Cine de autor?
Revisión del concepto de autoría cinematográfica (2005), Trazos de cine español (2007)
and Constructores de ilusiones: la dirección artística cinematográfica en España (2010),
the last with Jorge Gorostiza. He is currently writing a book called La trayectoria
cinematográfica internacional de Francisco Rabal.
Jean-Claude Seguin is Agrégé de l’université and since 1996 Professor at the
University of Lyon. His research focuses on the history of Spanish cinema and the
origins of cinema internationally. He is president of GRIMH (Grupo de Reflexión
sobre la Imagen en el Mundo Hispánico) which organizes a conference every two
years. He has given invited lectures in universities and at conferences in France,
Spain, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, and Mexico. He is the author of over 100
articles and fifteen books, including Histoire du cinéma espagnol (1994), La Production
Cinématographique des Frères Lumiére (1996), Los orígenes del cine en Cataluña (2004),
Pedro Almodóvar o la deriva de los cuerpos (2009), and La llegada del cine de España.
Notes on Contributors
xiii
Paul Julian Smith is Distinguished Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and
Luso-Brazilian Languages and Literatures at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and
was for twenty years Professor of Spanish at Cambridge University. He is the
author of fifteen books including Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar
(1994, 2000), Amores Perros (2008), and Television in Spain (2006). He has been
Visiting Professor in ten universities including Stanford, Berkeley, and the
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He has published over seventy academic articles
in learned journals and collections and has received over 100 invitations to speak at
international conferences or to give invited lectures around the world. He is a
regular contributor to Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute,
and a columnist for Film Quarterly, published by the University of California. He
was a Juror for the Mexican Feature Competition in the International Film Festival
of Morelia, Mexico, 2009 and Cinema Tropical’s Latin American Film Competition,
2011. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2008.
E. K. Tan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in
the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at SUNY Stony Brook. His areas
of interest include Sinophone literature and film, modern and contemporary
Chinese literature, Southeast Asian studies, Asian Diaspora studies, cultural translation, globalization, transnationalism, and film theory. He is completing a book
manuscript tentatively entitled Translational Identity: Articulations of Chineseness in
the Literary Imaginaries of the Nanyang Chinese.
Kathleen M. Vernon is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
Hispanic Languages and Literature at the SUNY Stony Brook where she teaches
courses on Spanish and Latin American cinema and culture. She has published
widely on various aspects of Spanish cinema from the 1930s to the present, with
special focus on musical and historical film, melodrama and stardom, documentary, and women’s cinema. She is co-editor of the first English-language journal
devoted to Spanish and Latin American film, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas. Her publications include The Spanish Civil War and the Visual Arts (1990) and Post-Franco,
Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (1995). She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Rhythms of History, Cinema, Music and Cultural Memory in
Contemporary Spain and two multi-authored books, The Mediation of Everyday Life:
An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s and 50s Spain and Film Magazines, Fashion
and Photography in 1940s and 50s Spain.
Francisco A. Zurian is Director of the Permanent Inter-University Research
Seminar “Gender, Aesthetics and Audiovisual Culture” of the FONTA Research
Group, Department of Audiovisual Communication and Publicity-1, at the
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). His research focuses on aesthetics
and theory of film and audiovisual media; cultural and gender studies applied to
audiovisual culture; audiovisual narrative and script; and film, television and
xiv
Notes on Contributors
contemporary Spanish culture, with a special interest in the cinema of Pedro
Almodóvar. His publications include the books, Pensar el cine (2011) and Manual de
Iniciación al Arte Cinematográfico (1996), as author, and Género, sexualidad y estética
en la cine y la televisión: cuestiones de representación (2012) and Pedro Almodóvar, El cine
como pasión (2005), as editor, as well as numerous book chapters and articles.
Acknowledgments
A volume such as this, by its very nature, is a transnational venture, the product of
intense collaboration among scholars and members of the Spanish film industry
engaged in a cross-cultural dialogue that reflects the multiple dimensions of critical
thought that surround Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema in Spain, France, the United
Kingdom and the United States. We are especially indebted to Jayne Fargnoli, our
editor at Wiley-Blackwell who first encouraged us to develop our conception of
this Companion to Pedro Amodóvar’s cinema and who has served as a constant
source of support and sage advice during all phases of the preparation of this
volume.
Special thanks must also go to Agustín Almodóvar and Diego Pajuelo Almodóvar
who gave unstintingly of their time in response to all our queries and who heightened our understanding of Almodóvar’s cinema in the contexts of the Spanish film
industry and global movie culture. They provided us with access to El Deseo’s
archival resources on the national and international reception of Almodóvar’s
films. Our thanks also go to Lola García who helped us navigate through the vast
archives of El Deseo as we put together the visual backdrop to this volume. She
was joined by a team of equally resourceful and energetic members of El Deseo’s
family: Bárbara Peiró, Mercedes González Barreira, and Anna Bogutskaya.
We were fortunate to have been able to call upon the expertise of our friends in
Madrid, Margarita Lobo of the Filmoteca Española, who provided advice and
direction on issues of historical contexts of post-Franco film culture, and to Fran
Zurian who offered us the insights of his own experience of putting together an
earlier important anthology on Almodóvar.
One of the unique challenges of editing an anthology of this sort is the need
to coordinate a team of scholars who come from a diverse range of cultural and
critical traditions. Each has demonstrated a passionate engagement in their own
work on Almodóvar. Thus, a key part of our task has been to encourage creativity
and originality but to try to balance the intensity of individual insights with the
volume’s goal of a collective coherence on the subject of Almodóvar’s cinema.
xvi
Acknowledgments
This has involved a unique kind of collaborative effort in which contributors have
often been called on to rethink and at times reorder their own contributions in
ways that promote the overall design of the volume. We have been fortunate in
working with a team of first-rate scholars whose groundbreaking approaches to
Almodóvar’s cinema are only matched by their intellectual generosity and willingness to collaborate in the formation of a collective discourse that is greater than
the sum of the individual parts. This volume benefited tremendously from their
uncommon scholarly esprit de corps.
On the technical level, our efforts have been supported by the thoroughly
professional production team at Wiley that included Julia Kirk and Tessa Hanford.
Finally, our most heart-felt gratitude must go to Carol D’Lugo and Cliff Eisen,
who served as sounding boards for our ideas and editors-at-large, providing loving
support through the inevitable frustrations that always accompany a project of
this nature.
Introduction
The Skin He Lives In
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
A Spotlight on the Self-Conscious Auteur
Since the moment of his on-screen appearance as the master of ceremonies at the
“General Erections” contest in his first commercially released film, Pepi, Luci, Bom y
otras chicas del montón/Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980), Pedro Almodóvar
has never shied away from the self-referential spotlight, both in and around his movies. Over the years, the in-your-face Almodóvar has moved out of the sights of the
camera lens—his last on-screen appearance in one of his own films was in La ley del
deseo/Law of Desire (1987)—even as his off-screen promotion of his films has increased.
By May 2011, with the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his eighteenth feature, La piel
que habito/The Skin I Live In, we find on display the essential paradox of “auteur
desire,” as Dana Polan called it (2001: n. p.), that mutual construction by filmmaker
and spectator or critic of an authorial persona embodied and expressed through an
artistically recognized body of work. On the surface, as he would claim to Spanish
interviewer Angel Harguindey (2011), the film is not about him, yet it was presented
and received through a festival promotion that makes the suggestion of La piel as an
allegory of his own authorship unavoidable. That self-referentiality begins in the
choice of a title for the film based on the novel Tarantula (Thierry Jonquet, 2005).
Once before, in ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!/What Have I Done to Deserve This?
(1984), he teasingly invited those interpretations by choosing the first-person pronoun
in the film’s title. In that case, the narrative agency of the “I” of the title hinted at a
symbolic identification between Almodóvar’s heroine, Gloria, brilliantly played by
Carmen Maura, and the filmmaker’s own artistic and social biography.1
La piel ’s title similarly draws our attention to the agent of action, but with a notable ambiguity since none of the surface references suggest any overt biographical
connection between the mad scientist, Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), and
A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, First Edition. Edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon.
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
2
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
Almodóvar’s own life or career. The film’s plot follows Ledgard, a famous plastic
surgeon, who kidnaps the young man Vicente ( Jan Cornet) who attempted to rape
his daughter and in doing so aggravated her mental breakdown, eventually leading
to her suicide. Ledgard holds the young man captive in his fortress home, performing a radical form of cosmetic surgery, including a vaginoplasty, that transforms
Vicente into Vera (played by Elena Anaya) with the face of his deceased wife. In
a twist on the dual Frankenstein–Pygmalion plot, Ledgard falls in love with his creation who appears to go along with his/her captor only to murder him at the end.
One might therefore reasonably assume that the “I” of the film’s title more appropriately refers to the regendered Vicente/Vera than to the creator/victimizer
Ledgard. It is on this level of opaque associations, far removed from the film’s
explicit narrative, that authorial self-reference begins to take shape.
Ledgard’s determination is to develop a superior form of human skin, impervious
to fire or puncture wounds, as well as the effects of ageing. This emphasis on skin as
the focus of the mad doctor’s experimentation, reflected in the formulation of the
film’s title, suggestively moves us to connect his efforts to the magical properties of
that other skin, celluloid, which in classical cinematic terms captures the image in
time and does not age. Almodóvar’s film, in fact, is very much about ageing as well
as about the self-conscious construction of identity that the skin surgeon, like the
filmmaker, proffers. Aside from Almodóvar’s obvious lifting of major plot elements
from Georges Franju’s classic horror film, Les yeux sans visage/Eyes without a Face
(1960), La piel contains very few of the cinematic quotes from other directors or films
of the type that usually abound in Almodóvar’s cinema. Instead, the film’s title,
alluding most obviously to the double perspective of a man imprisoned in the body
of a woman, suggests a subtler and more complex allegorical cinematic signifier
rooted in the curious etymology of the Spanish word for film, “película,” which
derives from the same Latin root as the word for skin (“piel” in Spanish).2 Out of
such surface wordplay, first postulated in Almodóvar’s title, we may discern that
much of what surrounds La piel as the latest installment of an ongoing discourse on
film authorship alludes to the cinematic allegories of lives lived and those captured
through technologies related to representation and appearance.
These embedded authorial self-references are only heightened by the decision to
stage the world premiere of the film at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Beyond its
standing as a prestigious international launch site, Cannes offers the occasion for the
biographical auteur and his film to share the spotlight. The French festival has long
held a special personal association for Almodóvar. He had brought his early film,
Laberinto de pasiones/Labyrinth of Passion to Cannes in 1982 but the film was ignored
and, as he recalled, he felt like a tourist (Limnander 2009: 64). He would return again
“officially” on at least six more occasions to participate in increasingly visible roles in
the ceremonial competition. After serving as a member of the festival jury in 1992, he
later won the Best Director award for Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother (1999).
La mala educación/Bad Education opened the festival in 2004 and he won the award for
Best Screenplay for Volver in 2006, with the film’s female leads capturing a collective
Introduction
3
award for Best Actress. His fifth official appearance at the festival was to compete with
Los abrazos rotos/Broken Embraces in 2009. As in his previous visits, the festival’s main
prize, the coveted Palme d’Or, eluded him, as it would again in 2011.
There is also an underlying artistic narrative linking Almodóvar with Cannes.
Together with the non-competitive New York Film Festival, Cannes has played a crucial role in constructing the image of the international Almodóvar. Not coincidentally,
it was the festival that frequently provided the stage for another legendary Spanish
filmmaker, Luis Buñuel. Over the last three decades, Almodóvar has come to be
viewed generally as the heir to Buñuel. So sure were the organizers that La piel would
be an occasion of note, that they scheduled the film’s screening to coincide with the
fiftieth anniversary of the original, and highly consequential, screening of Viridiana.3
At first glance, such extravagant extra-cinematic details might seem to say less about
the film than its commercial exploitation. Yet, as David James reminds us in Allegories
of Cinema (1989), a film never exists in a purely textual vacuum but as the product and
projection of the complex and layered operation that is the institution of cinema
itself: “Cinema is never just the occasion of an object or a text, never simply the location of a message or an aesthetic event.. . . [but t] he whole panoply of visual and aural
media, of advertising, of journalism, of the political process and the urban landscape
of signs. . . . A film’s images and sounds never fail to tell the story of how and why
they were produced—the story of their mode of production” (1989: 5).
This series of contexts beyond the object of cinema—its multiple processes of
creation, circulation, and construction of modes of reception—all tied to the
persona of Almodóvar the auteur guides the elaboration of the present volume.
Like the self-referential allegory of cinema that is contained in microcosm in every
aspect of Almodóvar’s brand of filmmaking, the Cannes premiere of La piel
provides an opportunity to shed light on the salient features of the filmmaker’s
trajectory in a career that now spans thirty years.
At Cannes, Almodóvar would briefly share the spotlight with another cinematic
personality, Antonio Banderas, an actor whose career, some would say, was
invented by Almodóvar when the former made his first appearance in Laberinto de
pasiones. Still it was Banderas’s notorious role in La ley del deseo that brought the
young actor to international attention, eventually leading to his crossover career in
Hollywood. With major and secondary roles in five of Almodóvar’s first eight
films, Banderas last appeared in an Almodóvar film some twenty-one years earlier
in ¡Átame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990). The actor’s return to his cinema “home”
with La piel led many spectators and critics to note the thematic similarities
between the two films in their different takes on a kidnapping narrative.
Much had transpired in the two decades since the two men last worked together.
Banderas has become a familiar face and an even more familiar voice for American
audiences. Almodóvar, whose star was already in the ascendancy following his 1988
crossover hit, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown, in which Banderas had a supporting role, has achieved an artistic standing
that places him among the very few auteurs—Hitchcock, Buñuel, Chaplin—who
4
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
Figure 0.1 Role reversal: A playful Antonio Banderas adjusts the director’s pose during
the filming of ¡Atame! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1990; prod. El Deseo, S.A.) © El Deseo, S.A.,
S.L.U. © Jorge Aparicio.
might be classified as matrix figures whose impact transcends the purely textual
domain of cinema. In other words, following Michel Foucault’s famous meditation
on authorship, Almodóvar not only possesses the stylistic consistency that characterizes authorship, but he is also an “initiator of discursive practices” (1977: 131). That
is, he has established a cinematic style that other filmmakers imitate (the adjective
“Almodovarian” is not only applied to his own work but also to the style of others
who appear to be emulating him).
In such a self-consciously public reencounter, the Cannes commentators could
not resist conjuring up the respective pasts of the filmmaker and his lead actor,
viewing their professional re-encounter in larger bio-filmic terms. Banderas’s star
persona has taken shape as the result of a series of acting roles that rendered him
an all-purpose Latin lover (Mambo Kings [Arne Glimcher, 1992]; Miami Rhapsody
[David Frankel, 1995]); a parodic variant of the Latino swash-buckling hero
(Desperado [Robert Rodríguez, 1995]; The Mask of Zorro [Martin Campbell, 1998]);
a family man (Spy Kids [Gregorio Cortez, 2001] and its sequels); and most recently
the reincarnation of a fairytale hero, but one without the claws or menace associated with his feline or Latin identity (beginning in Shrek 2 [Andrew Adamson et
al., 2004) and continuing in its spin-off into the 2011 hit Puss ’n’ Boots [Chris
Miller]). His presence as the iconic Latin male for Hollywood would pave the way
for two other Spaniards, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, also Almodóvar
Introduction
5
Figure 0.2 Banderas and Almodóvar relax on the set of La piel que habito (Pedro
Almodóvar, 2011; prod. El Deseo, S.A.). © El Deseo, S.A., S.L.U. © Lucía Faraig.
alumni, who could easily be recast either as Latin Americans, U.S. Latinos, or
“others” by Hollywood screen writers and directors. All three would help forge the
aura of star-maker around Almodóvar their mentor but it is Banderas, perhaps
owing to his successful sexual polymorphism in Almodóvar’s early works, that
could be understood to best embody and reflect Almodóvar’s career trajectory.
The Banderas reunion with Almodóvar in La piel would bring into focus
another bio-filmic dimension of the collaboration as it suggested to some critics
a change in Amodóvar’s approach to one of his signature themes, sexuality.
Banderas first appeared in Laberinto as a gay terrorist and was ironically marked
in their subsequent films together as gay, heterosexual, or at times as sexually
ambivalent.4 In this way he became a stand-in for the sexual and social fluidity
central to Almodóvar’s early commercial filmmaking. That same fluidity is metonymically woven into the expanding Almodovarian narrative through the presence of transsexual characters who, initially, lean comic (Tina, played by Carmen
Maura and her lesbian lover played by Bibi Anderson in La ley del deseo; Agrado
[Antonia San Juan] in Todo sobre mi madre), and later, toward more tragic outcomes (Lola [Toni Cantó], also in Todo sobre mi madre; the adult Ignacio [Francisco
Boira] in La mala educación). In La piel, it would seem, Almodóvar uses Banderas
self-consciously to move those limits of gender in unexpected directions as
Ledgard employs gender transfer as an act of revenge against the man who
attempted to rape his daughter.
6
Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon
In this respect one may want to speak of Almodóvar’s “evolution,” to use the
word his alter-ego, the romance novelist turned serious writer Leo (Marisa
Paredes), uses in La flor de mi secreto/The Flower of My Secret (1995). Evolution for
Leo meant precisely that shift from the popular vein to a presumed art discourse,
what she calls at one point “las novelas que salen negras” (the novels that come out
black), playing on the Spanish name for the romance novel form that made her
career, “novela rosa.” The phrase foretells Almodóvar’s own aspirations in the face
of his increasing success at home and abroad.5
To pin down the lines of that evolution, we might sketch out some of the important dates that mark the trajectory in the approximately twenty-year interval
between Banderas’s departure for Hollywood and his return in La piel. The 1991
production of Tacones lejanos/High Heels marks the first of a series of collaborative
projects with the French production company CIBY 2000, enabling Almodóvar to
stabilize his presence both artistically and commercially with respect to the lucrative French market where he wins a César for the film and begins to cement a
mainstream European status. This commercial alliance apparently also provides El
Deseo, his production company founded in 1985, financial stability as he aspires to
redefine himself beyond the narrow contexts of Spanish national cinema. It is
arguably the “Frenchness” of the international Almodóvar which, in addition to
his critical and commercial successes in the U.S. market, defines the transformation of the punk populist of the early Movida films into the European art cinema
favorite he would later become.
In 1993, El Deseo takes on the production of Alex de la Iglesia’s first feature,
Acción mutante/Mutant Action. This initiates a period of diversification in which
Almodóvar is able, through his production company, to support the careers of
other young Spanish directors (including Mónica Laguna, Daniel Calparsoro,
Dunia Ayaso, and Félix Sabroso). This line of development culminates in 2003
with El Deseo’s production of the first of two English-language films by Isabel
Coixet, My Life without Me/Mi vida sin mí. Importantly, these filmmakers are
not mere surrogates for an Almodóvar school or genre; rather, they reflect the
fact that his authorial self-construction has progressed beyond the individual
and has become institutional. Thus, by the third decade of his career, it is clear
that he has moved beyond the conventional sense of the film auteur as the
name given to a visual/narrative style and has become deeply engaged in what
Janet Staiger calls “Authorship as technique of the self ” (2003: 49–52), by which
she means the concept of the authorial as “the art of existence . . . a repetitive
assertion of ‘self-as-expresser’ through culturally and socially laden discourses”
(2003: 50). While still deeply engaged in developing his own creative trajectory,
the expansion of his cinematic activities beyond his own work marks a redefinition of the author as commercial entrepreneur that will move him deeper
into the realm of a commodity production ( James 1989: 84). Rooted in that
role is the implicit view that the auteur is tied to but not constrained either by
genre or nation. This is a scenario worked out in multiple ways in Almodóvar’s